Southeast Side of the Western Slopes

[Linda McCarthy]

Thanks, Martin, for your kind and encouraging response. 
I sure appreciate each of your great tips and recommended settings.  I'll try what you suggest re lighting for the clouds.  Right now they look more like whipped egg whites. 

I did use a powerfractal to blend the strata, but changed the settings a bit to bring out the more.  I think I unchecked the high and low color, but maybe I forgot.

Thanks again!
Linda

Much much better now I really like the way you've progressed this image, well done Linda!
The strata really adds interest to the terrain I think. Especially in the foreground it looks really nice.
Next time you could try to break the strata-pattern a bit up by blending it with a powerfractal (with negative color-offset).

I'm not as good in clouds as Frank for example, but my suggestion would be to either:

1) reduce cloud color and scatter color (I'd go for scatter first).
2) reduce the glow amount to 0.25 and power to ~0.5 for example.
glow amount = how the glow is distributed over the atmosphere/clouds. The lower the value the more evenly distributed. The higher the value the more glow closer to the lightsource.
The glow power then regulates how strong that glow is.
3) you could try to reduce the enviro light strength in the cloud-node. Although I think the first 2 options should be explored first because I "believe" more in those solutions.

Good luck and keep it up!

Martin

[Tangled-Universe]

If you use a powerfractal for displacement then it's no problem to have the high or low color unchecked, or both.
But if you use a powerfractal as blendshader, the node which uses that powerfractal needs the powerfractals color for the mask.
So unchecking high-color then will not work then. Actually, I'm a bit surprised the strata will even show up if the blendshader is either not connected but activated or connected but without any color-input.
So my guess is that you have enabled the high color, but that the mask was not "strong" enough.
Anyhow, still nice work

Martin

[schmeerlap]

Be aware of the following peculiarity.  When you use a power fractal shader for displacement in a Surface layer, you do have to have Apply high colour checked otherwise your displacement won't be applied. If you haven't got a colour function or applied a colour via the colour picker on the Colour tab of the Surface layer then the High colour of your displacement power fractal (which by default will be white) will be applied unless you uncheck the Apply colour on the colour tab of your Surface layer.

John